The Valentine’s Day Gift That Saves Lives

This is mainly of in­ter­est to Effec­tive Altru­ism-al­igned Less Wrongers. Thanks to Agnes Vish­nevkin, Jake Krycia, Will Kiely, Jo Duyvestyn, Alfredo Parra, Jay Quigley, Hunter Glenn, and Rhema Hokama for look­ing at draft ver­sions of this post. At least one as­piring ra­tio­nal­ist who read a draft ver­sion of this post, af­ter talk­ing to his girlfriend, de­cided to adopt this new Valen­tine’s Day tra­di­tion, which is some proof of its im­pact. The more it’s shared, the more this new tra­di­tion might get taken up, and if you want to share it, I sug­gest you share the ver­sion of this post pub­lished on The Life You Can Save blog. It’s also cross-posted on the In­ten­tional In­sights blog and on the EA Fo­rum.

Last year, my wife gave me the most ro­man­tic Valen­tine’s Day gift ever.

We had pre­vi­ously been very tra­di­tional with our Valen­tine’s Day gifts, such as fancy candy for her or a bot­tle of nice liquor for me. Yet shortly be­fore Valen­tine’s Day, she ap­proached me about re­think­ing that tra­di­tion.

Did candy or liquor truly ex­press our love for each other? Is it more im­por­tant that a gift helps the other per­son be happy and healthy, or that it fol­lows tra­di­tional pat­terns?

In­stead of candy and liquor, my wife sug­gested giv­ing each other gifts that ac­tu­ally help us im­prove our men­tal and phys­i­cal well-be­ing, and the world as a whole, by donat­ing to char­i­ties in the name of the other per­son.

She de­scribed an ar­ti­cle she read about a study that found that peo­ple who give to char­ity feel hap­pier than those that don’t give. The ex­per­i­menters gave peo­ple money and asked them to spend it ei­ther on them­selves or on oth­ers. Those who spent it on oth­ers ex­pe­rienced greater hap­piness.

Not only that, such giv­ing also made peo­ple healthier. Another study showed that par­ti­ci­pants who gave to oth­ers ex­pe­rienced a sig­nifi­cant de­crease in blood pres­sure, which did not hap­pen to those who spent money on themselves

So my thought­ful wife sug­gested we try an ex­per­i­ment: for Valen­tine’s Day, we’d give to char­ity in the name of the other per­son. This way, we could make each other hap­pier and healthier, while helping save lives at the same time. More­over, we could even im­prove our re­la­tion­ship!

I ac­cepted my wife’s sug­ges­tion gladly. We de­cided to donate $50 per per­son, and keep our gifts se­cret from each other, only pre­sent­ing them at the restau­rant when we went out for Valen­tine’s Day.

While I couldn’t pre­dict my wife’s choice, I had an idea about how she would make it. We’ve re­searched char­i­ties be­fore, and wanted to find ones where our limited dol­lars could go as far as pos­si­ble to­ward sav­ing lives. We found ex­cel­lent char­ity eval­u­a­tors that find the most effec­tive char­i­ties and make our choices easy. Our two fa­vorites are GiveWell, which has ex­ten­sive re­search re­ports on the best char­i­ties, and The Life You Can Save, which pro­vides an Im­pact Calcu­la­tor that shows you the ac­tual im­pact of your dona­tion. Th­ese data-driven eval­u­a­tors are part of the broader effec­tive al­tru­ism move­ment that seeks to make sure our giv­ing does the most good per dol­lar. I was con­fi­dent my wife would se­lect a char­ity recom­mended by a high-qual­ity eval­u­a­tor.

On Valen­tine’s Day, we went to our fa­vorite date night place, a lit­tle Ital­ian restau­rant not far from our house. After a deli­cious cheese­cake dessert, it was time for our gift ex­change. She pre­sented her gift first, a dona­tion to the Against Malaria Foun­da­tion. With her $50 gift in my name, she bought 20 large bed-size nets that would pro­tect fam­i­lies in the de­vel­op­ing world against deadly malaria-car­ry­ing mosquitoes. In turn, I donated $50 to GiveDirectly, in her name. This char­ity trans­fers money di­rectly to re­cip­i­ents in some of the poor­est villages in Africa, who have the dig­nity of us­ing the money as they wish. It is like giv­ing money di­rectly to the home­less, ex­cept dol­lars go a lot fur­ther in East Africa than in the US.

We were so ex­cited by our mu­tual gifts! They were so much bet­ter than any choco­late or liquor could be. We both helped each other save lives, and felt so great about do­ing so in the con­text of a gift for the other per­son. We de­cided to trans­form this ex­per­i­ment into a new tra­di­tion for our fam­ily.

It was the most ro­man­tic Valen­tine’s Day pre­sent I ever got, and made me re­al­ize how much bet­ter Valen­tine’s Day can be for my­self, my wife, and peo­ple all around the world. All it takes is a con­ver­sa­tion about show­ing true love for your part­ner by im­prov­ing her or his health and hap­piness. Is there any rea­son to not have that con­ver­sa­tion?

Harsh, but this does have two HuffPo-like traits: first, he uses his open­ing line to make a point that’s grossly mis­lead­ing, and repack­ages his generic pitch for EA as some­thing rele­vant to an up­com­ing holi­day. “Hey, you know what’s the most ro­man­tic thing to do? Turns out that it’s the same thing we recom­mend do­ing all the time. What a co­in­ci­dence!”

Se­cond, his fac­toids about the psy­chol­ogy of gen­eros­ity are as mis­lead­ing as HuffPo-tier sci­ence re­port­ing. Gen­er­ally speak­ing, the psych/​neu­ropsych stud­ies I’ve read don’t re­ally sup­port the con­clu­sions that EAs seem to want them to, in­clud­ing those stud­ies that they cite as ev­i­dence. Speci­fi­cally speak­ing, in this case, the stud­ies don’t seem to in­di­cate that char­i­ta­ble giv­ing is spe­cial, broadly or vis-a-vis the ac­tivity that this post is con­trast­ing them with. I.e., nei­ther of the ar­ti­cles provide ev­i­dence that giv­ing to char­ity has a par­tic­u­lar ad­van­tage in mak­ing peo­ple feel good over other forms of gen­er­ous be­hav­ior, in­clud­ing the con­ven­tional Valen­tine’s Day one of giv­ing some­thing nice and ro­man­tic to some­one you love. In­deed, most of the re­search I’ve seen on the sub­ject in­di­cates that a wide range of ac­tions taken on be­half of oth­ers pro­duce neu­rolog­i­cal re­wards.

I’d find it very strange if ac­tions to­ward other peo­ple you didn’t know pro­duced greater psy­cholog­i­cal re­wards than those you knew and loved, and I’ve yet to see any ev­i­dence that it’s true. Anec­do­tally, it seems vastly more likely that the op­po­site is true: that if you’re try­ing to max­i­mize your own hap­piness, be­ing gen­er­ous to the peo­ple you love is the best way to push this psy­cholog­i­cal but­ton.

nei­ther of the ar­ti­cles provide ev­i­dence that giv­ing to char­ity has a par­tic­u­lar ad­van­tage in mak­ing peo­ple feel good over other forms of gen­er­ous be­hav­ior, in­clud­ing the con­ven­tional Valen­tine’s Day one of giv­ing some­thing nice and ro­man­tic to some­one you love.

But the ques­tion here is not whether giv­ing to char­ity beats act­ing ro­man­tic to one’s part­ner (Gleb and his wife are ob­vi­ously be­ing ro­man­tic to each other; in­deed, they’re also choos­ing to en­joy an ex­pe­rience which will likely make them hap­pier in the long term—din­ing in a nice cozy restau­rant), but whether it’s bet­ter than buy­ing ex­pen­sive stuff for them­selves. And the ev­i­dence seems to be that get­ting a costly ma­te­rial gift raises the giver’s sta­tus in your mind, but doesn’t re­ally make you hap­pier. So why not re­place this part with char­i­ta­ble giv­ing?

But the ques­tion here is … whether giv­ing to char­ity … is bet­ter than buy­ing ex­pen­sive stuff for them­selves.

This is all so bass-ack­ward. Your premise seems to be that the Valen­tine Day is all about spend­ing money, so if you’re spend­ing money any­way why not spend it on char­ity. How­ever “buy­ing ex­pen­sive stuff” is not a ter­mi­nal goal, but merely in­stru­men­tal—re­plac­ing it with some­thing that does not achieve the same ter­mi­nal goal is coun­ter­pro­duc­tive.

Valen­tine Day is about ex­press­ing very per­sonal at­ten­tion to and care for an­other per­son. It is NOT about your­self and demon­strat­ing your ad­mirable qual­ities like will­ing­ness to give money to char­ity. If you think it’s just an op­por­tu­nity to sta­tus-sig­nal, you’re do­ing it wrong.

Sure, there are lots of peo­ple who take the easy way and sub­sti­tute “took time and effort to find/​make/​pick” with “ex­pen­sive”. But these are pre­cisely the kind of peo­ple who will look at a sug­ges­tion to re­place the flow­ers/​di­a­monds/​etc. with con­doms for Afri­cans with in­cre­dulity. Th­ese are not your tar­get au­di­ence.

Be­sides, if a S-RCN (Self-Re­spect­ing Con­ven­tional Neu­rotyp­i­cal) girl gets “I gave some con­doms to Afri­cans as a pre­sent to you” for Valen­tine Day, her im­me­di­ate first in­stinct would be to kick the giver in the yarbles. If she’s quick-think­ing, though, she’ll re­al­ize he doesn’t have any yarbles, so she’ll just give up and leave.

The two solu­tions to this situ­a­tion are (a) pick some­thing other than con­ven­tional neu­rotyp­i­cal; (b) don’t be a bloody idiot.

But the ques­tion here is not whether giv­ing to char­ity beats act­ing ro­man­tic to one’s part­ner (Gleb and his wife are ob­vi­ously be­ing ro­man­tic to each other; in­deed, they’re also choos­ing to en­joy an ex­pe­rience which will likely make them hap­pier in the long term—din­ing in a nice cozy restau­rant), but whether it’s bet­ter than buy­ing ex­pen­sive stuff for them­selves.

I don’t think that’s the ques­tion. You aren’t con­strained to the op­tions of an “ex­pen­sive” gift (car­ry­ing the con­no­ta­tion of low emo­tional res­o­nance) or a char­i­ta­ble dona­tion. You can also spend that $50 on an­other nice ex­pe­rience with your loved one, or you can buy a cool ac­ces­sory that goes with their sense of style, or you can buy a beau­tifully bound jour­nal and fill it with thoughts you have about them over the course of months, etc. You can do a lot of things. I’d guess that around 100% of peo­ple I know and >99.5% of gen­pop would find one or all of those op­tions more ro­man­tic than a char­i­ta­ble dona­tion, and that it would make them hap­pier. I have no churl­ish ob­jec­tion to this par­tic­u­lar cou­ple find­ing a dona­tion to be the most mean­ingful pos­si­ble gift. But the over­whelming ma­jor­ity of peo­ple won’t, so pre­sent­ing this as the op­tion that’ll make them hap­piest is likely to fall flat.

And the ev­i­dence seems to be that get­ting a costly ma­te­rial gift raises the giver’s sta­tus in your mind, but doesn’t re­ally make you hap­pier.

I haven’t seen this ev­i­dence—can you link me? Noth­ing in the post, or linked in any­thing linked in the post, seems to show that. Does this ev­i­dence ap­ply to ro­man­tic part­ners, and does it in­clude “per­son­al­ized” gifts? (I.e., those the giver put a lot of thought into, and which were se­lected speci­fi­cally for a part­ner they know very well.) I would be quite sur­prised if that were true. I would be com­pletely un­sur­prised if it was true of ar­bi­trary ma­te­rial gifts, but I think the take­away there is “don’t buy your wife a wash­ing ma­chine for your first an­niver­sary” rather than “don’t buy your wife a gift.”

The effect of gift-giv­ing on the giver isn’t to be ne­glected, ei­ther. Do­ing some­thing nice for a loved one makes most peo­ple feel par­tic­u­larly good about them­selves. There’s also some in­di­ca­tion that such ac­tions make most peo­ple feel more con­nected with and de­voted to the re­cip­i­ent. (Essen­tially an ex­tended form of the Ben Fran­klin effect,)

You can also spend that $50 on an­other nice ex­pe­rience with your loved one, or you can buy a cool ac­ces­sory that goes with their sense of style, or you can buy a beau­tifully bound jour­nal and fill it with thoughts you have about them over the course of months, etc.

Sure, but how many peo­ple do that? Let’s face it, most peo­ple are lazy. So they cel­e­brate V-Day by buy­ing waste­ful $#!+ for each other. Char­i­ta­ble gifts could be less ro­man­tic than well-cho­sen ex­pe­riences, and still beat $#!+ by a huge mar­gin.

If the ar­gu­ment be­ing put for­ward is that it’s not good to give ter­rible ro­man­tic gifts (i.e., those that make nei­ther the giver nor the re­ceiver happy), and that, as such, any non­nega­tive al­ter­na­tive ac­tivi­ties—in­clud­ing char­i­ta­ble gifts—might be bet­ter, I find that very difficult to dis­agree with. Per­son­ally, I think that the cor­rect re­sponse to that situ­a­tion is to get bet­ter at giv­ing gifts, though.

WithAThou­sandFaces didn’t make that state­ment. The state­ment he made was

I’d guess that around [...] 99.5% of gen­pop would (etc.)

not

99.5% of gen­pop would (etc.)

and those are very differ­ent state­ments. In par­tic­u­lar, if WATF can’t provide ev­i­dence that 99.5% of peo­ple would (etc.) then you could rea­son­ably claim he was be­ing dishon­est or in­com­pe­tent in mak­ing the state­ment you at­tributed to him[1], but not in mak­ing the state­ment he ac­tu­ally made.

[1] Though in most con­texts ac­tu­ally mak­ing such ac­cu­sa­tions is overkill.

Ok, I see what you mean. He did say “the over­whelming ma­jor­ity of peo­ple won’t” find “a dona­tion to be the most mean­ingful pos­si­ble gift” so my take was that WATF un­der­stood “99.5% of gen­pop” as “over­whelming ma­jor­ity.” I’d be com­fortable if WATF can provide ev­i­dence that an “over­whelming ma­jor­ity” of peo­ple won’t find “a dona­tion to be the most mean­ingful pos­si­ble gift.”

You are wel­come to dis­agree, of course—we clearly have a differ­ence of opinion.

I’d be cu­ri­ous to see you write up your own ver­sion of a call to ac­tion to change thoughts and be­hav­iors around a cached pat­tern to see what you mean by a “well-writ­ten” one. Post a link here when you do so, and I will be happy to edit the post to add an up­date in­di­cat­ing that you wrote a differ­ent piece. Thanks!

Maybe my prefer­ences have been pro­grammed to be hope­lessly ir­ra­tional by decades of con­di­tion­ing via Hal­l­mark and the rest of this damned cap­i­tal­ist so­ciety, but this strikes me as ter­ribly un­ro­man­tic.

I think two peo­ple can agree that (A) giv­ing to char­ity is good, and (B) that lav­ish gift giv­ing at in­vented holi­days is ex­ces­sive, but to com­bine the two on Valen­tine’s Day and pre­tend it is ro­man­tic ac­cord­ing to some strange defi­ni­tion of the word is a stretch, me­thinks.

to com­bine the two on Valen­tine’s Day and pre­tend it is ro­man­tic ac­cord­ing to some strange defi­ni­tion of the word is a stretch, me­thinks.

Not so much of a stretch. Part of ro­mance is of­ten a sense of shared val­ues and pur­pose. A Valen­tine’s day where you re­ally acted out to help each other achieve those val­ues could end up be­ing very bond­ing and very ro­man­tic.

A shared com­mit­ment to live your val­ues, par­tic­u­larly in the con­text of Valen­tine’s Day, also im­plies a shared com­mit­ment to live your val­ues in terms of your love for one an­other.

In prac­tice, it may or may not work. No doubt suc­cess would de­pend on a lot of things. The ex­change of gift cer­tifi­cates is a bit too in­tel­lec­tu­ally me­di­ated for my tastes. Like giv­ing them an or­gasm pill in­stead of hav­ing sex—“Happy Valen­tine’s Day!”.

But I wouldn’t pooh pooh it out of hand—and I’m gen­er­ally a cranky old pooh pooher.

The ex­change of gift cer­tifi­cates is a bit too in­tel­lec­tu­ally me­di­ated for my tastes.

Agreed. It is, dare I say, un­ro­man­tic ac­cord­ing to some huge chuck of the pop­u­la­tion.

Thought­ful be­cause it re­quired some time and con­sid­er­a­tion? Sure. Creative in a shak­ing up the sta­tus quo sort of way? Yep. Ra­tional in a util­i­tar­ian sense? Yes, sir.

Ro­man­tic? Only if you want to re­define tra­di­tional/​clas­sic ro­mance to mean some­thing else.

You could sub­sti­tute any holi­day and any re­la­tion­ship in Gleb’s ar­ti­cle. It’s not like giv­ing to char­i­ties on be­half of an­other in lieu of ex­chang­ing gifts is a novel idea (my fam­ily has been do­ing it for years). He just wrote it and pre­tended it was a good dis­play of “ro­mance” be­cause Valen­tine’s Day is com­ing up.

But I wouldn’t pooh pooh it out of hand—and I’m gen­er­ally a cranky old pooh pooher.

This wasn’t my in­ten­tion. I ac­tu­ally think Gleb gets too much re­sis­tance on LW for his efforts. This just seemed off to me, and kept seem­ing off the more I thought about it. So I com­mented.

Re­gard­ing ro­mance, I think of it as a feel­ing that I want to help the other per­son have a great life, be happy, and flour­ish, and a con­fi­dence that they want the same for me, with sex thrown in.

Maybe you’re just less com­mit­ted to char­ity than Gleb Tsipursky and his wife. This tra­di­tion seems to suit them though, so why should we ob­ject?

And even then, effi­cient char­ity could definitely be­come an el­e­ment of folks’ V-day gifts. Buy the usual sort of ro­man­tic warm-fuzzies (choco­late, greet­ing cards) and use im­pres­sive char­ity to en­dow them with sought-af­ter ex­clu­sivity and high-sta­tus, rather than sheer mar­ket­ing-in­duced waste.

I’m sorry, but this is just the sort of reach that is silly and un­pro­duc­tive in my view.

I con­ceded giv­ing to char­i­ties is much more use­ful than tra­di­tional gifts in a util­i­tar­ian sense (duh), but this has noth­ing to do with ro­mance. (Un­less you define ro­mance way out­side the norm. If so, fine. But don’t ex­pect any­one else to pay the slight­est at­ten­tion.)

I mean, let’s just go all the way here: In­stead of wed­dings, we could have a big fundraiser; In­stead of mak­ing out, we should re­search char­i­ties to­gether on­line. Th­ese choices are of su­pe­rior util­ity, there­fore they are ro­man­tic!

There is a point where push­ing ra­tio­nal­ity (and that’s what Gleb is do­ing, from my un­der­stand­ing) in ex­treme ways is ir­ra­tional, be­cause peo­ple think it’s su­per weird. The cur­rent sys­tem of ev­ery­one giv­ing ev­ery­one else gifts for ev­ery frig­gin holi­day on the cal­en­dar is, I agree, ir­ra­tional. (My fam­ily give char­i­ta­ble dona­tions as part of our Christ­mas gifts). But, at some point, it can be taken too far and peo­ple tune you out.

Judg­ing by the fact that this post got 500 FB likes the first day it was posted on The Life You Can Save Blog, peo­ple are not tun­ing it out. Note, the baseline for posts on TLYCS blog is about 100-200 likes over their life­time, not the first day.

Read­ing through the In­ten­tional In­sights fb page [1] it looks to me like you’re us­ing paid likes? The “peo­ple” who liked those posts all look like fake ac­counts. While I can’t see the spe­cific ac­counts that ‘liked’ your TLYCS post, is that what you did there too? If so get­ting 500 fb likes doesn’t tell us that it was un­usu­ally good.

Th­ese all look fake to me, but let’s look at the last one be­cause it’s the weirdest. The most re­cent 19 posts are all re-shares of In­ten­tional In­sights posts or posts el­se­where by Gleb. Look­ing at the fb pages they “like” I see:

AlterNet (News/​Me­dia Web­site)

Nige­rian Movies (Lo­cal Busi­ness)

Poise Hair Col­lec­tion (Health/​Beauty)

Bold F.aces (Public Figure)

Get Auto Loan (Au­to­mo­biles and Parts)

Closeup (Product/​Ser­vice)

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky (Writer)

Hero Lager (Food/​Bev­er­ages)

EBook Korner Kafé (Book)

In­ten­tional In­sights (Non-Profit Or­ga­ni­za­tion)

Ad­di­tion­ally, look­ing through the peo­ple who like typ­i­cal In­ten­tional In­sights posts, they’re from a wide range of third world coun­tries, with (as far as I can see) no one from richer coun­tries. This also points to paid likes, since poor-coun­try likes are cheaper than rich-coun­try ones, and be­ing pop­u­lar only in third world coun­tries doesn’t seem likely from your writ­ing.

Is there some other ex­pla­na­tion for this pat­tern? “Paid likes” is the only thing that seems plau­si­ble to me.

They are not fake in the sense of fake peo­ple—Gleb runs meat­pup­pets, err… paid vir­tual as­sis­tants. Th­ese are real peo­ple, it’s just that they are em­ployed by InIn and their job is so­cial me­dia pro­mo­tion which means they are paid to retweet, like, up­vote. See e.g. this com­ment and the fol­low-up.

This also points to paid likes, since poor-coun­try likes are cheaper than rich-coun­try ones, and be­ing pop­u­lar only in third world coun­tries doesn’t seem likely from your writ­ing.

Why don’t you think there are rea­sons that In­ten­tional In­sights might be more pop­u­lar in poor-coun­tries?
Do you think you have a good idea what kind of con­tent an Bangladeshi athe­ist wants to read?

Thanks for ex­plain­ing your claims, and the ev­i­dence that led to it.

Let’s take Sar­gin in­deed as an ex­am­ple. He’s some­one who has read In­ten­tional In­sights con­tent for a while, and has been get­ting into ra­tio­nal­ity and effec­tive al­tru­ism as a re­sult. He offered to vol­un­teer for the or­ga­ni­za­tion, and has proved a good vol­un­teer. We then brought him on as a part-time con­trac­tor. We have sev­eral peo­ple like him, who vol­un­teer 2/​3rds of their time, and work for 1⁄3 of their time.

InIn so­cial me­dia and our web­site are tar­geted to all peo­ple around the world. Our web­site gets about 12K hits per month, with the fol­low­ing coun­tries be­ing the top 5 in the last month: US, In­dia, Phillipines, Malaysia, In­done­sia. Our FB page is “liked” mostly by peo­ple in de­vel­op­ing coun­tries as well.

Why is this? Par­tially be­cause of how our ad­ver­tis­ing works. We fol­low the “drown­ing child” model of ad­ver­tis­ing—we don’t place higher value on peo­ple in rich coun­tries than in poorer coun­tries when we pro­mote con­tent, as we be­lieve our con­tent can help peo­ple around the world. So when we boost a post on FB, we boost it in the most cost-effec­tive means pos­si­ble, which means it gets de­liv­ered mostly to the coun­tries where the clicks are cheap­est, namely In­dia, Phillipines, Malaysia, In­done­sia, etc. They then have the op­tion of click­ing “like” on the post and “lik­ing” the FB page, if they wish.

While we boost posts on FB, we don’t boost posts on Twit­ter or Pin­ter­est, as we don’t have the skills within the or­ga­ni­za­tion to do so. So you can see the differ­ence in our fol­low­ers on Twit­ter, of whom we have around 11K or so—most are not from de­vel­op­ing coun­tries, and the same is true of our 4.5K fol­low­ers on Pin­ter­est.

This is highly differ­ent from buy­ing likes, namely speci­fi­cally pay­ing peo­ple to like the page or posts. Do­ing so doesn’t build com­mu­nity or en­gage­ment, which is the point of so­cial me­dia, and would not al­ign with the In­ten­tional In­sights mis­sion of spread­ing ra­tio­nal think­ing and effec­tive al­tru­ism broadly. Since that’s the goal of InIn, it re­ally doesn’t make sense for us to do so.

We only do what ad­vances our mis­sion, even if some folks here might dis­agree with our meth­ods or goals—ori­ent­ing to­ward ask­ing what ad­vances our mis­sion and work­ing back­ward from that might help you model us bet­ter :-)

P. S. For any­one want­ing to help us up­date, the best way to con­vince us to do so is to show how what we’re do­ing is not ad­vanc­ing the mis­sion of pro­mot­ing ra­tio­nal think­ing and effec­tive al­tru­ist ideas broadly.

You seem to be­lieve your state­ment about Sar­gin con­tra­dicts mine.

You are mis­taken. I be­lieve my state­ment about Sar­gin Rukevwe (you’re em­ploy­ing his rel­a­tives as well, I think) ex­pands on your state­ment. As to con­tra­dic­tion, well, I have strong doubts about him get­ting into effec­tive al­tru­ism…

Your state­ment makes it sound like a claim that most of our likes comes from those we paid money to.

I don’t know about most of your likes and I sus­pect that varies. But your state­ment makes it sound like your likes do not come from peo­ple you pay to like the posts. In fact some of them do.

Isn’t it in­ter­est­ing how the list of peo­ple jkauf­man com­piled from just look­ing at who likes your Face­book posts looks very much like the list of peo­ple you pay money to?

A post like “Trump Feels Your Anger and Anx­iety: How Neu­ro­science Helps Ex­plain Trump’s Triumphs” has 242 likes on the InIn face­book page. If five of those are peo­ple that Gleb pays money to that’s doesn’t re­ally mat­ter. That also wouldn’t be the main con­cern that jkauf­man talks about.

Those 242 likes come from what I sam­pled from places like Bangladesh and In­done­sia. jkauf­man charges that those are mostly paid likes.

Isn’t it in­ter­est­ing how the list of peo­ple jkauf­man com­piled from just look­ing at who likes your Face­book posts looks very much like the list of peo­ple you pay money to?

If Gleb only pays money to those five peo­ple and not to the 237 other peo­ple who liked the post then, a huge part of jkauf­man charge isn’t cor­rect.

Now, are there peo­ple we pay who also like our FB posts? Sure. They are the ones who most con­sis­tently like them. This is one rea­son we hired them to work for us. It’s a pretty typ­i­cal thing to do for a non­profit to hire on vol­un­teers who are pas­sion­ate about the cause.

get­ting into effec­tive altruism

I ac­cept that you’re skep­ti­cal. Here’s an ex­am­ple of one of our vir­tual as­sis­tants de­scribing his get­ting into EA.

It’s a pretty typ­i­cal thing to do for a non­profit to hire on vol­un­teers who are pas­sion­ate about the cause.

Yes, but that is not what you are do­ing. You are not hiring es­pe­cially pas­sion­ate vol­un­teers. You’re hiring cheap third-world vir­tual as­sis­tants who re­post, like, and gen­er­ally pro­mote your posts for money, not be­cause they are es­pe­cially fond of InIn.

It doesn’t look like a silly ques­tion; steel­manned to some de­gree it would be “do you have any ev­i­dence of this, be­cause if that was true, I’d want to end that prac­tice in my or­ga­ni­za­tion”. I pre­fer sys­tems where bur­den of proof is on the ac­cuser, and whilst you don’t need payslips that have as job ti­tle “con­tent up­voter”, some ex­pla­na­tion would be nice.

It’s perfectly pos­si­ble to speak the truth whilst be­ing in­tel­lec­tu­ally dishon­est, you two could be ar­gu­ing past each other—“You’re en­gag­ing in shady busi­ness prac­tices!” “There’s no fraud here.”

“Paid likes” is a spe­cific prac­tice, one that we’ve never en­gaged in

Sorry, yes, you’re in­ter­pret­ing my use of “paid likes” as be­ing a very spe­cific thing, and I mean it differ­ently. Speci­fi­cally, I’m talk­ing about ac­counts that (a) click like and (b) are op­er­ated by some­one who re­ceived money from InIn and (c) wouldn’t have done (a) with­out (b).

Ah, I see there was a mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tion. In that case, sure, there are peo­ple who are paid for so­cial me­dia man­age­ment, and as part of do­ing so, click like on our posts. Yes, I sup­pose they would not be do­ing so as con­sis­tently as they are if they were not paid, al­though some­one who was let go due to fi­nan­cial con­straints still keeps lik­ing our posts con­sis­tently due to his en­thu­si­asm for the con­tent.

Not nec­es­sar­ily. Some­times they ex­pressed en­thu­si­asm in ways other than lik­ing our posts, such as send­ing me pri­vate emails and ex­press­ing a de­sire to vol­un­teer, etc. We only take on as con­trac­tors peo­ple who are pas­sion­ate about the cause, have benefited per­son­ally from the con­tent, and vol­un­teer at least 2⁄3 of their time or more.

It would seem that the ex­is­tence of such con­trac­tors fol­lows log­i­cally from the fact that you are able to hire peo­ple de­spite the fact that you re­quire con­trac­tors to vol­un­teer 2⁄3 of their time.

They are hired at 1⁄3 the stan­dard third-world rate, silly. They can make much more work­ing for an­other or­ga­ni­za­tion—they choose to work for In­ten­tional In­sights be­cause of their pas­sion for it. But any­way, I’m tired of this. I think I have ex­plained the situ­a­tion clearly enough for any ra­tio­nal be­ing to up­date. If you re­fuse to be ra­tio­nal about it, I’m not go­ing to waste my time on this any­more.

they choose to work for In­ten­tional In­sights be­cause of their pas­sion for it

LOL. Y’know, you in­flict a lot of dam­age to your­self and your brand just be­cause you stub­bornly in­sist on your petty lies and keep on dig­ging when the cor­rect (dare I say ra­tio­nal? X-D) choice of ac­tion is to cut and run...

I love that you keep show­ing your ig­no­rance through­out this con­ver­sa­tion. Gold star for this one, es­pe­cially. See the min­i­mum rate for Up­work if you’re cu­ri­ous about this. Con­sider this com­ment an ex­tra fa­vor to help you learn.

Not go­ing to dig­nify the rest of your silly com­men­tary with an­swers. Oh, and BTW, thanks for draw­ing more at­ten­tion to In­ten­tional In­sights with your com­men­tary. Peo­ple love con­tro­versy, and this is one rea­son I en­joy en­gag­ing with your un­til you start be­ing repet­i­tive and uni­mag­i­na­tive, like you’re be­ing right now. Ta-ta!

I’m not sure that’s ter­ribly com­pel­ling ev­i­dence of any­thing. A post like yours is an ap­plause light for that crowd.

Any­way, I think my main beef is the ar­ti­cle try­ing to push this as “ro­man­tic”. Typ­i­cal mind fal­lacy is a thing, so maybe it’s just differ­ent strokes, but I’ve never met a woman who would find this even marginally ro­man­tic, by any defi­ni­tion I’m aware of.

As for the gen­eral idea of es­chew­ing gift ex­changes in fa­vor of dona­tions: Love it. It just seems your try­ing too hard to pre­tend it’s speci­fi­cally “ro­man­tic”, and that feels weird to me.

I like the con­ver­gences ar­ti­cle, saw it be­fore. But why wouldn’t EA be a good sub­sti­tute? In one world, we’re pay­ing money to the con­sumer in­dus­try for candy and liquor. In the other world, we’re pay­ing money to help peo­ple have bet­ter lives. I cer­tainly like the sec­ond world bet­ter, and so does my wife :-)

I’m won­der­ing how one offers a way out—sup­pose that one part­ner is much more en­thu­si­as­tic about EA than the other. The cou­ple tries the com­bi­na­tion of rea­son­ably priced fun and EA one year, and the less en­thu­si­as­tic one doesn’t feel it’s satis­fy­ing. Can that part­ner say “let’s not do it that way next year?” with­out feel­ing shamed for it?

Nancy, sure, I think it’s quite doable. Say­ing some­thing like “that ex­pe­rience wasn’t satis­fy­ing/​ro­man­tic for me” is quite ap­pro­pri­ate. This is why my wife and I, when we first did it, framed it in the form of an ex­per­i­ment, and hav­ing that fram­ing is im­por­tant, I think.